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Does metadata matter?
The document discusses the history and importance of metadata. It describes how metadata standards have evolved over time, from MARC for library catalogs to Dublin Core for web pages to RDF for the semantic web. It also discusses how metadata is now commonly used for repositories of research publications and data to help discover and manage institutional assets. While search engines ignore most embedded metadata, standards and policies around metadata have still spread widely across domains like education, libraries, and cultural heritage.
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Does metadata matter?
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- 2. or… should webe interested in metadata and, if so, why?
- 3. I’m going totry to deliver 130 slides in 30 minutes
- 4. then you canask questions (yes… I really did say “130 slides”)
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- 16. delivery / accesscontrol
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- 20. MARC - Machine-ReadableCatalogue
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- 23. still the predominantmetadata standard (in the library world)
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- 25. a distributed searchstandard called… Z39.50 so that multiple library catalogues can be searched from one place
- 26. AACR2 currently beingreplaced by… RDA (more generic – i.e. not just books!)
- 27. Z39.50 supplemented bySRW and SRU (Web-friendly variants)
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- 29. none of whichneeds bother you…
- 30. other than tonote that…
- 31. metadata tends toget more complicated the longer you think about it
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- 35. a few 10sof 1000s of pages
- 36. but recognised thatfinding stuff was going to start getting difficult
- 37. people (mainly librarians)began trying to catalogue it by hand
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- 42. AltaVista (first majorWeb search engine – circa 1995)
- 43. people began torealise that the metadata they embedded into Web pages might be important
- 44. hang on… didI just say “metadata embedded into Web pages”?
- 45. <html> <head> <title>Aweb page</title> </head> <body> … </body> </html>
- 46. <html> <head> <title>Aweb page</title> <meta name=“keywords” content=“some, key, words” /> <meta name=“description” content=“a summary” /> </head> <body> …
- 47. birth of theSEO industry
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- 49. and the rest,as they say, is history
- 50. Google takes noteof links between pages Google PageRank
- 51. but places lessemphasis on embedded metadata
- 52. metaspam <meta name=“keywords”content=“coca cola” />
- 53. metacrap <title>put yourtitle here</title>
- 54. despite that, workcontinued on embedded metadata most notably in the form of…
- 55. Dublin Core (circa1995)
- 56. initially 15 metadataelements a.k.a properties a.k.a. attribute/value pairs
- 57. contributor coverage creatordate description format identifier language publisher relation rights source subject title type
- 58. embedded into Webpages
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- 60. intention was toimprove indexing by search engines
- 61. but people forgotabout…
- 62. “ metaspam” and“metacrap”
- 63. the search enginesdidn’t!
- 64. and so, byand large, search engines still ignore embedded metadata
- 65. despite that, therehas been fairly widespread adoption in policy terms
- 66. particularly in e-Government(e.g. UK eGMS)
- 67. but also inother areas – education, health, environmental agencies, libraries, cultural heritage sector, …
- 68. growth of rulesaround metadata content (i.e. cataloguing rules) (everyone’s rules are different)
- 69. and growth inuse of additional elements for particular communities (and everyone’s additions are different)
- 70. such usage documentedin the form of “application profiles”
- 71. Dublin Core MetadataInitiative coordinating “standards” body (note again: growing complexity over time)
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- 73. the W3C developedthe Resource Description Framework (RDF) (circa 1999)
- 74. the standard forthe “Semantic Web”
- 75. Tim Berners-Lee’s visionfor a machine-readable Web of data
- 76. allowing software tonavigate and reason about Web content automatically
- 77. a Web of“Linked Data”
- 78. RDF, RDFS, OWL,FOAF, … (but also Microformats, RSS, …)
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- 80. elearning community wasbusy developing its own standards
- 81. IEEE LOM (LearningObject Metadata)
- 82. same as DC…but different! (different elements, different syntax)
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- 86. URI (Uniform ResourceIdentifier) is the identifier system of the Web
- 87. but some issues…e.g. around persistence
- 88. to cut along story short
- 89. it turns outthat ‘http’ URIs (a.k.a. URLs) are the worst kind of Web identifier…
- 90. …apart from allthe others
- 91. (not everyone agreeswith that!)
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- 96. but arXiv wasnot the only repository
- 97. recognised need foraggregating metadata from different repositories into a single place so that it could be searched
- 98. OAI-PMH (a protocolfor metadata harvesting)
- 99. harvesting metadata intorepository search engines of which OAIster is best known (but it isn’t really used much)
- 100. and the majorsearch engines like Google don’t support the OAI-PMH
- 101. because it isn’tmainstream enough (and because of “metaspam” and “metacrap”)
- 102. and so to2008…
- 103. political agenda aroundinstitutional repositories
- 104. in order tostore, manage and disclose…
- 105. institutional assets researchpapers learning objects research data
- 106. exposing metadata aboutthese things using the OAI-PMH to search services
- 107. which services? err…OAIster :-(
- 108. what kind ofmetadata? typically DC
- 109. or a variantof DC because simple DC is really too simple to be very useful
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- 111. …DC variants tendto be more complex and therefore metadata can’t be created very easily by ordinary researchers
- 112. but that’s anotherstory!
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- 114. why are weinterested?
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- 123. metadata in siteslike the Science Museum is mostly locked away within the site
- 124. can expect growingpressure to expose it on the Web for others to “mash up”
- 125. in HE, weare operating in an “institutional repository” political environment
- 126. we (should?) havean interest in repositories of research publications and research data particularly research data
- 127. metadata comes tothe fore in scenarios where content is non-textual (e.g. data) and where required information can’t easily be derived from textual content (e.g. author name)
- 128.
- 129. OK I lied……it was 128 slides
- 130. unless you countthese last two